Eileen Myles Quotes

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now. ~ Eileen Myles

With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first. ~ Eileen Myles

I've grown to love Barack Obama. Hillary is no Bernie Sanders. But she's a politician, and she understands Congress. And I think with that kind of twisted beauty, she could lead our country. ~ Eileen Myles

I awoke from this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room.

At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn't know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine.

Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane's body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one.

'Need each other as much as you can bear,' writes Eileen Myles. 'Everywhere you go in the world.'

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me.

Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.

Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God. ~ Maggie Nelson

He had studied philosophy as a young man, but clay really spoke to him. I like mud, he explained. And then he went on to explain the Earth's magnetism, and why clay does stick together and it's about ions and stuff. And there are specific muds, or clays. For instance, this: red. Deep deep beautiful red. Albany slip. I stand there in awe, slipping around in worlds of specialization. The endless details, but the Earth is a big wad of it, mud. And that would be a huge start, to know that you liked it. There it is. ~ Eileen Myles

I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions. ~ Eileen Myles

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr's hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak - a whispering that enables us into its world ... a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them. ~ Eileen Myles

The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live. ~ Eileen Myles

If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do. ~ Eileen Myles

I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around. ~ Eileen Myles

Who doesn't want to be famous? I am famous. I'm dying to be on TV. ~ Eileen Myles

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield. ~ Eileen Myles

I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture. ~ Eileen Myles

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved. ~ Eileen Myles

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil. ~ Eileen Myles

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak. ~ Eileen Myles

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time. ~ Eileen Myles

Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. ~ Eileen Myles

I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream. ~ Eileen Myles

As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy. ~ Eileen Myles

Already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country ~ Eileen Myles

I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I'm holding out half to you ~ Eileen Myles

Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years. ~ Eileen Myles

Dogs are a companion species. It's about time - you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog. ~ Eileen Myles

Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man. ~ Eileen Myles

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet. ~ Eileen Myles

The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend. ~ Eileen Myles

I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health. ~ Eileen Myles

Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe. ~ Eileen Myles

For all these reasons (...) working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It's what they think of as 'smart'. Pomposity. It's an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago that I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting 'smart' and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is. ~ Eileen Myles

When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are. ~ Eileen Myles

I wonder, would I have transitioned from female to male if I was 30 years younger? Possibly. But if I had been born even 30 years later, because it seems like the technology will only get better, it seems like one might not ever need to settle down at all. ~ Eileen Myles

If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways. ~ Eileen Myles

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know. ~ Eileen Myles

I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens. ~ Eileen Myles

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels. ~ Eileen Myles

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other's hearts. I guess there's other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home. ~ Eileen Myles

Time passes. That's for sure. ~ Eileen Myles

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it. ~ Eileen Myles

We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for - that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit. ~ Eileen Myles

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having. ~ Eileen Myles

Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books. ~ Eileen Myles

If boys were always trying to get in girls' pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift. ~ Eileen Myles

If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch, ~ Eileen Myles

I always aimed at being a legend. ~ Eileen Myles

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous. ~ Eileen Myles

Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before. ~ Eileen Myles

I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light. ~ Eileen Myles (author)

I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous. ~ Eileen Myles

Lucifer's name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language. ~ Eileen Myles

The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down. ~ Eileen Myles

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life - not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again. ~ Eileen Myles

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. ~ Eileen Myles

In my family, I'm the middle of three, and I'm like a lot of middle children. I was one of those kids that floated from group to group. I liked being able to be included in all the groups - the bad kids, the smart kids. ~ Eileen Myles

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience. ~ Eileen Myles

I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years. ~ Eileen Myles

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. ~ Eileen Myles

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff. ~ Eileen Myles

In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special. ~ Eileen Myles

Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone. ~ Eileen Myles

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he'd liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn't the pure ethical person she'd perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.

Keith said, "It's like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice."

I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. "It's a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT'S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!"

I tried to explain what I meant.

I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn't know what their true sexuality was like, because they'd been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don't tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of t ~ Emily Gould

I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects. ~ Eileen Myles

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear. ~ Eileen Myles

I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life. ~ Eileen Myles

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie. ~ Eileen Myles

What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that's how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive. ~ Eileen Myles

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time. ~ Eileen Myles

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor. ~ Eileen Myles

As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary. ~ Eileen Myles

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both. ~ Eileen Myles

(Interviews Ntozake Shange) "What do you think an artist's job is?"
"To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren't numb by our struggles to survive. That's what I think our job is right now. ~ Eileen Myles

When certain parts of our bodies are touched, certain enzymes and chemicals that trigger sexual desire are released into our system. The more our bodies are stimulated, the more chemicals are released and the greater our sexual desire grows until it becomes a virtually unstoppable flood. ~ Myles Munroe

Find a balance between one's responsibility as a white person to confront acts of racism and one's subconscious sense of power and privilege over people of color when reacting to the [racist] event. ~ Eileen O'Brien

The study showed that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, resulting in decreased performance and increased stress. In other words, clutter in your surroundings correlates to clutter in your mind. ~ Eileen Rose Giadone

This ... all this, the room, the people here,the odd little pairs and groups they'd formed, the ways each was finding to connect the others ... this was what she fought for. For these people, yes. And for moments like this, punctuated by coffee or tea, with a baby on one man's shoulder and a saint humming over the fireplace ... everyone gathered together to work toward their common goal. She fought for them, and for people she'd never met and never would, people who deserved a chance to make their own moments, built from their own flawed choices, with the people they found. ~ Eileen Wilks

We need people in the areas that create laws and policies who are filled with the Kingdom so that those laws can become the fabric of our social development. ~ Myles Munroe

Leaders think differently about themselves, and this distinguishes them from followers. ~ Myles Munroe

I don't know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn't tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you. ~ Myles Horton

I have a big belief that whatever your passion is in life, pursue it to the fullest and try to be the best at it. ~ Myles Jury

God may not explain Himself, but He will reveal Himself. ~ Myles Munroe

Besides, I thought it was kind of cool that you noticed I have good dexterity." he waved his fingers in front of my face. "I like the idea of you thinking about what my hands can do." He winked before turning to leave.
I flushed even redder. "I wasn't thinking about your hands," I called after him.
"Sure you weren't."
"I wasn't. I was trying to be nice."
Drew turned around to face me, leaning against the doorjamb. "Admit it. you're thinking about it now." He saluted and left.
I kicked the cart Darn it. Now I was thinking about it. ~ Eileen Cook

All you need within you is waiting to unfold and reveal itself. ~ Eileen Caddy

A principle is a truth that is established by God that can never be changed. ~ Myles Munroe

She wasn't entertainment for him. He
didn't need her to make him laugh or bolster his ego or to figure him out so he wouldn't have to. A lot of men who said they were looking for a relationship really wanted a combination sex buddy, therapist, and mirror. ~ Eileen Wilks

Don't ever make the mistake of telling God that you have nothing to offer. That simply is not true. God does not create any junk. ~ Myles Munroe

It's not a competition, it's a doorway. ~ Mary Oliver

I was shown a fledgling learning to fly. It's first efforts were very feeble. But as it used its wings more and more, they became stronger until it found the freedom of flight and was able to soar to great heights and fly great distance without any effort. I heard the words: Faith comes with practice. Live by faith until it becomes rocklike unshakable, and find the true freedom of the spirit. ~ Eileen Caddy

Why is being an unmarried woman something that we should be ashamed of, as if we've failed? Men don't feel this way. When they haven't married, they make it sound like they've gotten away with something. Their single status makes them even more appealing to the other sex. ~ Eileen Cook

There is no place on you I can't love, and love grants me entry ... ~ Eileen Wilks

For a woman, language spoken is an expression of what she is feeling. For a man, language spoken is an expression of what he is thinking. A woman says what is on her heart while a man says what is on his mind. ~ Myles Munroe

If you are not in good terms with the one who sent you, you can't have the right direction to the errands he wants to send you for. Be in good talking terms with God; pray without ceasing! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

My feelings were hurt. Once I started I couldn't seem to let it go.
Be strange if the person who matters most in the whole world couldn't hurt your feelings, wouldn't it? ~ Eileen Wilks

We will never obtain God's kind of marriage simply by going along with the crowd, doing what everybody else does. We have to dig deep into the heart of God to discover His principles. ~ Myles Munroe

Why is it they say you always hurt the ones you love? Because you know exactly how to do it. ~ Eileen Cook

Don't you see? It's getting to us. The doll is messing with our feelings. I'm filled with all these thoughts of warmth and love and respect for all of you. Get it out. I went to the sink to splash water on my face. ~ Eileen Rendahl

Alasdair yanked a pillow, shoving it under his arse. "I think you'll find I'm a heavy but remarkably fit and supple git, thank you very much." He spread his legs wide open and leered.
"With real self-esteem issues." Cosmo deadpanned.
"I will have if you don't hurry up and make love to me."
"Make love?" Aww, that's sweet."
"Less talking. More shagging."
"Yes, boss!" Cosmo saluted with his free hand ... ~ Josephine Myles

We're men, and men aren't born to stand alone. ~ Tamora Pierce

When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, "I would rather not say." This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street - Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment - his, or her mother's - and did not want to speak of how he earned his living. Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it. ~ Lorrie Moore

Praise must be learned in private before it is exhibited in public. ~ Myles Munroe

I'm socially impaired. I get surprised all the time by people saying and doing irrational things. Take gay marriage. Why would some people get so upset that people they didn't even know wanted to get married?"
"For the same reason men denied women the vote for so long. It threatens their status and their understanding of the world."
She beamed, delighted that he saw it, too. "That's right! I had to think and think to figure that out. Though I still don't see why they're so scared of changing their minds."
"Because the world is a dangerous place. If it doesn't work the way we believe it does, the danger becomes unmanageable. ~ Eileen Wilks